Bentley's Bandstand
It can’t be easy being a band that gets lumped into the wide net of Americana music these days. It’s like being an alternative band in the early ‘90s. That definition was so broad as to be almost meaningless. But Ha Ha Tonka twist their sound into enough novel contortions that they really don’t fall anywhere but into a unique category of their own. It is an emotionally raw world they travel in, with guitars scraping the bottom of the whiskey barrel, and a rhythm section pushing hard and hitting strong. The lives they write about aren’t really hard luck stories, but more like the tales of people living just beyond the edge of hope, but close enough to hold onto the ledge without falling off. If they were to make a movie to fit this music, they’d hire Warren Oates to play the lead if he were still alive, and L.Q. Jones to be the not-so-threatening bad guy. It would be set around Springfield, Missouri, where Ha Ha Tonka is from, and Strother Martin would direct. And “Walking on the Devil’s Backbone” would have to be the title song, while “Close Every Valve to Your Bleeding Heart” would play over the end credits. Brett Anderson, Lennon Bone, Lucas Long and Brian Roberts (each sounding like the name of an actor) play like a band of brothers. You can tell it from the first song “Pendergrast Machine.” They have a way of starting off with a timidity that is quickly blown to bits in the name of dynamic range. One song ends with the line, “No good deed goes unpunished around here,” and it’s that fatalism seated way down in the heart that gives this album its soul. There isn’t a happy ending waiting when Novel Sounds Of The Noveau South is over, but rather a hard-won acceptance that life is filled with tough times tempered by soft love, and a balancing of the two is the only way out. Ha Ha Tonka isn’t laughing, but their tears of rage aren’t about to drown them either. Big thanks for small gifts.
